An Edible Woodland Adventure: Fungi Foray!

For a very long time now, I have been wanting to go on a guided mushrooming walk. One of my favorite things in the world is finding wild food. I love being able to identify plants, and I have a keen eye for gleanable fruit and herbs on our family walks, wherever we may be. But mushrooms are something you don’t just mess around with. Sure, you could find something tasty. Or, you could die. I wasn’t even willing to give it a shot with a good book– I needed an expert if I was even going to try anything I found in the woods.

Experts, it turns out, can charge a whole lot of money to take you mushrooming. I had looked up a bunch of guided walks, but it was going to be somewhere between £50 and £100 for the three of us. I kept looking, and more urgently so as I realized that this is prime fungus season. And then I found the Suffolk Wildlife Trust! This is an awesome organization dedicated to not only preserving the beautiful lands on the many nature preserves in our area, but also developing education and recreational programs to help people learn about and enjoy their surroundings. And guess what? There was an afternoon Fungi Foray with a mycology expert on Sunday, for free!

All three of us were so excited, that it was hard for me not to get worried that our hopes for the event might be too high. The preserve (Knettishall Heath) was just half an hour away from our home, and the day was dreamily foggy, but not too cold.

There was a group of about a dozen people, mostly a generation older than Jeff and me. Some were fungi enthusiasts, while others seemed to know as little as we did. Although the outings was intended for families, there were only two children there, including Amelia.
This year was lousy for gardens, but it has apparently been very, very good for mushrooms! Our expert told us that they did this last year, and only found four varieties, and three of them were growing on trees rather than on the ground. It took no time at all for us to find our first fungus: the Puffball Mushroom.

This one was very small, but they can actually get surprisingly large. I saw one in a TV show that was about the size of a football! These are pure white and kind of spongy inside, and although very edible, they’re still pretty bland.
Soon, we found the non-edible look-alike, the Earthball:

It looks the same on the outside, but when you cut it open, it’s full of dark grey spores, and smells of burnt rubber.

Most mushrooms had a distinct smell, and so we all did lots of sniffing.
Next up, someone found one of the more choice edibles in our area, the Bay Boletus:

The underside looks like sponge, instead of defined gills. This one made it home with us!
It didn’t take long to find one of the scarier ‘shrooms, Fly Agaric:

Pretty though, right?
Speaking of pretty, have you ever had purple mushrooms? I had never seen these before: Amethyst Deceivers. They are apparently very good for eating.

OK, so I’m not going to show you every single piece of fungus we found! But here are some of the pictures I took as we tromped through forest and heathland. Also, I really need to tell you that the land we covered was amazing, unlike anything I have ever seen before. The forest was really like a fairytale forest, the ground covered in soft pine needles and tree bark, sprouting big sword ferns, and of course littered with colorful mushrooms. The heath was mossy and covered with heather and more ferns. You guys, we had to wait to go into that part because there were wild ponies chasing each other, galloping in circles in the picture on the lower right. They finished their game and watched us through the trees in the forest, as we gathered more fungi. It was an extremely pleasant 2.5 hours.
At the end of our foray, we put all of the mushrooms on the table for further identification and examination. We had collected about 50 varieties! Most of them were non-edible, but we did get some key pointers on good edibles we might find in the future.

Then we got the chilling lesson on Death Cap mushrooms. The cap below has enough toxins to kill three adults. (We all shuddered. )

Unfortunately, this is one of the most common fungi in our forests. On that sobering note, we all packed up and said our goodbyes.
We brought home a small Puffball, a Bay Bolete and Amethyst Deceivers for an omelette dinner that evening.

How very satisfying! We will be looking for more fungi forays to join this month, taking advantage of the good mushroom weather.

Do you ever go mushroom foraging? What other wild food is available in your area?

By the way, I’ll be posting some extra mushroom pictures on the And Here We Are Facebook page, if you’d like to see more! Also, you can read about how this lesson paid off– we hit the jackpot in a beech forest just a week or so later.

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35 Responses to An Edible Woodland Adventure: Fungi Foray!

Mushrooms, magical forests and frolicking ponies?! Sounds so dreamy! I really enjoyed this post – thanks for sharing I’ve never hunted for mushrooms but I absolutely love to eat them. I bet the omelets were yummy.

Yes, Kristen, it was pretty dreamy! It is so nice that all three of us could enjoy the outing equally, and it was just so peaceful, too. (Sigh…) I am still timid about looking for mushrooms on my own, but I’ve never met one on a plate that I didn’t love.

I love foraging for food, but I tend to stick to flowers, fruits, nuts and greens. I have picked and eaten a melon-sized puffball, but other than that I’m very wary of mushrooms.In the UK I think most local Wildlife Trusts will offer those walks- have to confess I haven’t been on the one near us yet. I went on one organised by another group, but we found very little edible (although I got the impression the expert thought we were all going to go off poisoning ourselves if she identified anything tasty, so I think she may have down played the edibility of some!)

The area you were hunting in looks beautiful- reminds me of the New Forest. That’s full of horses, cows and deer. And pigs!

I think you are very smart to be wary of mushrooms in the wild. I mean, it’s not worth it to find something interesting to try, if it could cause liver failure, or wipe your family out! I would love to learn more, though, and just get comfortable with a few clearly identifiable mushrooms in my area. I have heard a lot of really nice things about New Forest– we will definitely have to check it out!

I mentioned to my mum that I’d love to be able to identify wild fungus and that we had what I was 99.9% sure was a shaggy ink cap in our garden. She sent me a newspaper cutting about a mushroom expert who gave his family permanent kidney failure. I’m sticking to puffballs!

Haha, I love how the guy giving the tour is wearing a mushroom shirt. Too cute.

That forest does look like a fairytale landscape! Wild ponies?? Do those even exist?

There are some very huge and scary-looking orange mushrooms growing in my apartment complex at the moment. I think the landscapers leave them there on purpose. They are quite impressive but I’m pretty sure they’re super poisonous. Gigantic, six or eight inches wide, bright, flat, orangey-red caps and white stalks?

Hey Ariana,Foraging for food sounds super cool. I met some people in Fairbanks that spend a weekend with their friends foraging for mushrooms and end up with about $300 worth of fungus…which is A LOT of mushrooms. Sounds pretty lucrative if you know what you’re doing.

Thanks, Scott! I checked it out, and it looks promising! Today on a visit to a farm, I am awfully sure that I found a whole bunch of edible boletes… But we didn’t take any home. There were SO many, and I knew probably no one else would take them, either… But I’m still a little timid about possibly poisoning my family.

Thank you for sharing this experience and linking it up. I so enjoyed reading about your adventure. It sounds like such a memory making day. How cool to be able to eat mushrooms you gathered yourself and without worry because you did so with an expert!

I can’t wait to start foraging mushrooms! Not dying would be a pleasant bonus, as would not spending a fortune. I’m thinking about buying a mushroom growing kit so we can avoid those two unfortunate setbacks.

I’ve been wanting to do this for any wild edibles, but your mushroom foray looks like so much fun! I’m in Iowa, in the US, and there’s not much offered around here, but maybe I’m not looking in the right places..

What a wonderful post. I remember mushroom picking as a child with my Dad, but much as I love the idea I wouldn’t have the confidence now to distinguish mushroom from toadstool. An organised trip like this looks perfect and I bet they were delicious!Thank you for sharing on Country Kids

Now that I know that the most poisonous mushroom is one of the most common I won’t be going foraging without an expert eye! The variety of mushrooms you found is amazing. Just popping over from Country Kids x

I am amazed and awed that we have several of the same mushrooms here in Gainesville, Florida that you have there. Those tiny mushrooms that looks like cups with pebbles in them? My herb garden was covered in those in November.

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[…] be there. And then we looked down, and discovered that we were surrounded by bright little Amethyst Deceivers. These mushrooms are one of a very few that I am confident enough about identifying and […]

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About Ariana

Ariana Mullins is an American writer, cook, explorer and photographer. She shares her family's stories of challenge and adventure as expats in Europe, as well as inspiration for living a simple and meaningful life. She has a passion for restoring lost kitchen arts and loves to share her experiences in foraging, butchery, home brewing and anything new she can get her hands on in her Spanish kitchen.

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